Outlook for Mac for Office 365 Database

One of the biggest improvements in Outlook for Mac for Office 365 compared to Outlook for Mac 2011 is that the database has been completely replaced by SQLite. If you’ve used Outlook for Mac 2011 previously, you may have ran into issues with database corruption and are familiar with having to manually rebuild the database.

With Outlook for Mac for Office 365, you will no longer need to manually perform database rebuilds. This is due to several reasons:

The reliability and stability of the new database have been greatly improved, so the likelihood of database issues occurring is lower overall.

Outlook will perform a silent recovery in the background for small database issues, no longer requiring database rebuilds.

For larger database issues where a silent recovery is not possible and a database rebuild is necessary, Outlook will prompt the user to repair the database to fix the problem.

Because of these changes, the ability to manually start a database rebuild is not available in Outlook for Mac for Office 365. This will help reduce time spent on rebuilding the database for issues that truly are not caused by database problems, thus a database rebuild is not necessary.

The Rebuild button found at the lower right of the Outlook for Mac 2011 Database Utility window is no longer available on the Outlook for Mac for Office 365 Profile Manager window.

For small database issues, such as missing or corrupt data, Outlook performs a silent recovery in the background by syncing the necessary data from the server or by reconstructing the corrupt file from data in the index. When this occurs, the user is not notified and likely won’t be aware this is occurring in the background at all.

For larger database issues, Outlook will notify the user with steps on how to recover the database. In this scenario Outlook will alert the user, force Outlook to restart, rebuild the database, and load the rebuilt database.

The user will receive this prompt when an issue occurs that requires database repair.

Great article but now I can’t repair my profile and outlook just hangs and hangs and need to force quit. I was actually looking to see if there was a manual database repair tool…. you failed again Microsoft.

Constant spinning beach balls, 1 min to select the menu or per request. Just beaching all the time. Can’t rebuild. What’s happening Microsoft, is this just your way of pissing people off with bad software.

On Outlook 2011, I regularly doing export of my emails and contacts. It saved me many times of loss my emails after database crashes.
With Outlook 2016, it is not possible to export, but it seems that there is a free tool … Does someone knows?

Spinning beachballs here too, never-ending. I have to resort to web-mail for a large percentage of my day, as just switching to the next email will give me a beach-ball for 10-30 seconds on a 6month old MacBook Pro maxed out. I can have the whole CS suite
going with multi-GB files, and I never see anything like these slowdowns. Too bad nearly my whole day is spent in email! Grrrr……

Bit arrogant is what comes to mind. Database is so amazing now that manual repairs are not needed anymore. I really think this option should come back even though the idea that automatic repairs happen is great as well

Just switched to a new Macbook Pro with Retina (from PCs because of perennial problems with Microsoft OSs and decided to buy Office 365 for MAC. But with Outlook, constantly spinning beach balls requiring forced restarts many times a day. Microsoft, Microsoft,
Microsoft – it’s August 17, 2015. Please correct this within the next couple of days or ……. you must be as clueless as everyone that uses this so-called software.

Experience seems to vary. I’ve used Outlook 2016 since the preview version and have only had a couple of crashes early on. I don’t remember the last problem I had. Word on the other hand will always crash, yet I know others that say it’s rock solid.